


[art] Genderbend Howlies pictures and backgrounds

by potofsoup



Series: Genderbends [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Gender or Sex Swap, it's complicated because dum dum is a trans man
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-19
Updated: 2019-02-19
Packaged: 2019-10-31 11:13:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17848373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potofsoup/pseuds/potofsoup
Summary: I kind of got into my genderbend Howlies and wrote/drew stuff about them. :)





	1. Fem!Howlies




	2. Jane Morita

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jane Morita

  
Jane is a Sansei (3rd generation), so her Japanese isn’t great. She’s one of the popular kids at school – you know, the kind to run for student government, and who seems to bridge a lot of the ethnic and class divides. (That changed after Pearl Harbor.) But when she’s not wrestling her straight hair into curls or planning ice cream socials, she also has a knack for fixing things. After all, figuring out what is blocking the diesel fuel line isn’t that different from coordinating the school dance. (But she’d never be caught in public with *that* getup)


	3. Mary Falsworth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mary Falsworth

  
Mary attended a boarding school, but there were also some day students from the surrounding neighborhood. Becky was one of them. They did everything together. The word amongst teachers was that Mary would have been Head Girl material if she’d applied herself more, but Mary’d rather go out on the town dressed in a fancy suit. (Becky was a local and knew all the best haunts.)


	4. Gabby Jones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gabby Jones

  
Gabby is a little bit older than the others of the Howlies (probably around the same age as Jeanne Dernier). She went to a Normal University and learned to be a foreign language instructor. She teaches in a segregated school, where it pains her to see her students with so little resources. (Because her school is so understaffed, she also teaches English and also moonlights as the school nurse.) She’s not all about work, though. On hot summer days she sneaks onto undeveloped beaches with her friends where they eat sandwiches and talk about moving north.


	5. Jeanne Dernier

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jeanne Dernier

  
Jeanne is a little bit older than the others of the Howlies (probably around the same age as Gabby Jones). She and her brother ran the family boulangerie in a small town. She’s always been a practical sort, and really enjoyed the physical and mental labor that went into baking proper bread. Her brother Pierre is the social one who’d man the front of the store. Then came the Nazis and Pierre’s death, and suddenly Jeanne couldn’t stay in the back baking bread anymore. She got herself a gun and joined the French Resistance. Although plenty of women in the resistance movement kept wearing skirts, Jeanne, well, Jeanne had a lot of extra men’s clothes lying around and she’s always been the practical sort. Soon she found that her skills in mixing the right ingredients at the right time transferred quite well into making explosives. Maybe she isn’t just in it to avenge her brother, after all.


	6. T. Dum-Dum Dugan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dum-Dum

Thelma’s story of how she ended up with Barnum changed with every telling – she started growing facial hair and got so confused and scared that she ran away to the circus. Her parents were frightened and sold her. She had no parents and it was her uncle, motivated by greed. It didn’t really matter what the truth was as long as it was a fun story. After all, no one was who they really seemed in the circus. The Liou twins themselves were not an exception -- they were Chinese but were pretending to be Korean sold more tickets. America’s a strange place where the stories you weave mattered more than your behavior.  
The thing that they knew to be true about Thelma, though, was that she hated circus life and drank too much. Maybe all the gawking was different for them because they’ve been at this since they were 6, and it must also be harder when you don’t have family. Seng-sen worried about Thelma’s health and Tang-sen couldn’t stand Thelma throwing all that good money into bad liquor. But when they found out the reason – well, becoming a man is easy enough in show business, especially when you already have the beard. Plus half the bearded women were actually men anyway – all it took was some training, some help from a doctor that their father knew, and a good recommendation to a different circus, and suddenly Thelma the Bearded Lady was Timothy the Strong Man. Seng-sen was happy to see him smile for once, and Tang-sen was happy that Dum-Dum kept his nickname for him. Sure, it meant that they didn’t get to see Dum-Dum much, but father said they were going back to China to get married soon anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I came across many stunning historical trans people in my brief research. Christine Jorgensen was a bit later but she fought in WWII before transitioning. Billy Tipton was more Dum-Dum’s time, but he just started living as a man and no one found out that he’d been anything but until his death in the 1980s. And then there’s Lili Elbe, who died trying to get a womb transplant so that she could have biological children. I’m just blown away by all these thoroughly human experiences, and I hope that my fictional Dum-Dum’s doesn’t seem too out of place.
> 
> 1920s and 1930s was really when trans people were starting to create their own communities and calling themselves transexuals and there were a number of high profile surgeries. But I feel like Dum-Dum probably wouldn’t have heard about them until later. (I’m trying to keep the circus background of comics Dum-Dum, plus I feel like there are class differences between these high-profile examples and Dum-Dum.) Bearded ladies were usually forced to dress hyper-feminine to accentuate the beard and draw out the sense of the grotesque. 
> 
> The Liou brothers were a famous set of conjoined twins around the turn of the century. I decided to move the Liou brothers’ lives back about 15 years to coincide with Dum-Dum. Of course, that meant that they probably cut their queues in 1911. They’re pretty rad! They did the circuit until they were 19, and then went home and got married and had children (fulfilling the proper Chinese familial expectations.) When one of them got sick in 1957, Beijing doctors performed a successful operation that saved the healthy twin. I’m particularly impressed because Beijing in 1957 was a pretty rough place for advanced surgery. I’ve headcanoned Tang-sen to be the sardonic one.


End file.
